A Cast of Coins

Time holds its breath,” Phyllis Stowell tells us, something that holds true throughout these compelling divinations, where time and the ordinary are suspended as she follows the coin toss wherever it leads her, reporting back to us with her fearless eye and lyrical tongue. The result is a series of poems that read like beautifully crafted notes from the unknown, which Stowell makes uncannily knowable as she reveals to us “a World within the world / sending messages.

— Lynne Knight

Darkening of the Light

明夷

When hands cast yarrow stalks or coins
the way they fall form ideographic figures
that come from darkening the light

as in a picture – in the foreground blooming peonies
mother behind her dark privet, dark house –
first the image then the judgment, an idea
like unendurability

My question was amorphous an uneasy
sense of need The lines a string of words
to balance all endearments gone with pearls

frame themselves a drape, bottleglass window
her body poised where the light falls
pearl chevrons snaking the braid of her hair

dissolving in the ambiguity of shadows
In an eerie, irreal light a figure standing
under a green hood her robe cracked open

like a lightning-struck tree inky black inside
In dread I stood below behind her mask
she answered me I am death